Daily Archives: October 16, 2009

Salt Spring Island has a pretty active museum and archival society, by the looks of it – at least, they are putting a lot of pictures and documents online. One thing which caught my eye was their photos of the Akerman Museum – which I take to be the private collection at the home of Bob Akerman. This is a striking carved object (of which I wish there were more photographs) described as: Black stone that they claim had healing power. Shamans used it when they were visiting the sick. Though elsewhere, they show another object with a similar description which appears not to be worked much, if at all. There’s no real documentation which is too bad — the stone tools in this picture, for example, strike me as more of a neolithic thing than a northwest coast one. I hope they have the information somewhere. This is an impressive metal celt, and it looks like he has a good collection of nephrite ones as well, though the picture is exceptionally poor. (NB – bandwidth is not nearly so much of a concern these days, so don’t shrink your pictures so much!) There are lots of slightly unusual artifacts, like this collection of handstones. All around, it looks like Akerman has a great collection — I don’t want to think too much about where the archaeological material came from, or how he came to have it, and I’d like to think there is a shoebox full of notes somewhere — but all the same it is interesting to peruse and I’m glad the Salt Spring Archives have at least some documentation of it.